


Determined

by JRaylin441



Series: Briareus [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Automail, Gen, Jean is trying to do a good thing, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 13:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7053370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JRaylin441/pseuds/JRaylin441
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean makes a couple of hasty decisions, Mustang disapproves, and Ed gets ordered around a bit.</p>
<p><i>Jean thought that maybe he should be scared, but while it was true that he was not looking forward to the coming pain, he found himself rather at peace the with idea of what he was about to do. Besides, Ed had been eleven when he had undergone the same thing, so while it would be bad, it couldn’t be </i>that<i> bad.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Determined

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I originally wrote this without rewatching the series, and it wasn't until I watched Brotherhood again that I realized some things were inaccurate. So let's pretend that this story is low-key AU. Sorry about that!

Havoc didn’t know a lot, but much of what he did know was composed of things he probably wasn’t supposed to. That sort of thing tended to happen when you worked in the military, especially when you worked under one Colonel Roy Mustang. Havoc knew that it was possible to create a homunculus, and that the fuhrer had been one. He knew that the Fullmetal Alchemist had at one time been half automail (and a fourth of him still was), and that his brother had at one time been nothing more than a suit of armor. Last of all, Havoc knew, from one particularly memorable overheard midnight conversation, that a philosopher’s stone was made from human souls.

The problem was, none of this information was in any way useful when trying to run a general store.

_Yes, madam, here’s your rope and jerky, and as a matter of fact, no. I have found that blowing up a homunculus is not the most efficient way to kill it, unless you have a way of quickly doing it many times in a row._

No, that wouldn’t go over very well.

To be honest, Havoc missed the military. Sure, he’d seen some things that he would rather forget, and he’d gone through some rather traumatizing situations, but at the end of the day he knew that he had a set of friends who would do anything for him. He knew exactly where he stood, in his life and among the team members, so that he never felt useless or confused. Life was easier in the military. Plus, women seemed to love a man in uniform.

With such fond memories, it had been difficult to find a bright side to being paralyzed from the waist down. In fact, it was still rather difficult. Which was probably why the phone call he had received the day before was so tempting. The Colonel, voice rushed and confident, still flying high off his victory, had been so sure of himself. The philosopher’s stone was the answer to all their problems. They would use the renewed vision and fixed legs to build a new Amestris.

The Colonel wanted to fix himself and Havoc, using a stone made from human souls.

And the logic made sense, when referring to Mustang. His motives were pure in wanting to protect everyone in the country by leading virtuously, and it would be an honorable use of the souls to make that happen. Havoc, on the other hand, knew that he had been useful to the Colonel, but never _that_ useful. Not enough so that he could logically assume that the souls would be okay with helping him.

Of course, the Colonel had also been overflowing with motivation. It had been fairly clear over the phone that he would not be taking no for an answer when he showed up in three days to perform the transmutation.

Which meant that something had to happen in the next three days. Havoc had to act fast, before either the Colonel arrived or his moral compass decided to take a vacation.

There were three options. One: Havoc could sit and wait for three days, allowing Roy to heal his spine when he arrived, and the return to Central to help with repairs. This plan had only one flaw, and it was that every nerve in Havoc’s body (working and not working) cried out at the _wrongness_ of it. Human lives were not meant to be collected and saved until their energy was needed by a new person who decided that their need was great enough. This plan was a no-go.

Option two: Havoc could wait for the Colonel to arrive and then try to hold his own in an argument. Ending in his remaining the chair, perhaps for the rest of his life. Which would really suck (the whole unable-to-move-the-bottom-half-of-his-body thing made attending to certain…needs in the preferred manner almost entirely impossible). Besides, Jean trusted himself about as far as he could walk when it came to maintaining his morals in the face of Mustang’s usually-overwhelming drive and passion. Havoc wouldn’t stand a chance. So another bust.

Option three: Havoc could act before the Colonel arrived, in such an irreversible way that there could be no way for Mustang to simply talk his way into what he wanted. Which would require him to do something that he had been deeply considering for a while now: automail. He would be able to walk again, after he recovered from the surgery. Besides, while few women could handle a man in a wheelchair, Havoc had heard of women who were turned on by metal body parts.

So really, there had only been one option from the start, which was how Havoc found himself wheeling his chair up the ramp outside the Rockbell’s house, after riding a train for hours. Of course he was terrified. There were stories passed among the men in the dormitories of a woman whom even Edward Elric was terrified of, who could order him around without any hesitation or moral qualms. A woman like that, Jean was sure, would be something.

“Hello.” She was beautiful, no doubt about that. The girl who answered the door was wearing a green tube top and bulky pants. She had a toolbelt slung round her waist and light blond hair that hung past it. Too young for Jean, but undeniably pretty.

“Hello. My name is Jean Havoc. Are you Winry Rockbell?” The girl nodded and took a glance at Jean’s whole body, quickly sizing up the situation. It was clear that this sort of thing happened rather often to her.

“Is there any way that I can help you?”

“Yes, I was hoping for some automail.”

*~*~*

She was quick, Jean would give her that. Once he had finally managed to convince the girl that this was what he wanted, and he would not change his mind, she had immediately launched into taking measurements of his legs and discussing the different options and kinds of automail that would be available to him. They discussed the options of going full-automail or of creating a framework over his lower spine and legs to hack into his nervous system and help control the muscles. Finally, they settled on the framework, which would allow him to keep his flesh legs (he wasn’t too fond of the amputation option) and maybe appear slightly normal. Two days, she said, before the ports would be ready and prepared from installation. Would that be enough time for him?

Two days was enough. It would all fit in with the schedule that would allow him to be irrevocably changed by the time Mustang arrived to ‘help’.

So two days passed with Jean trying not to think too hard about the stories he had heard about automail surgery. Even Winry hadn’t tried to sugar-coat it. _The most painful thing you will ever experience_. Which, he supposed, made sense. After all, they would be wiring into his nervous system. What more could be expected to happen?

Now the crisp white sheets of the operating bed were pressing into his chest, back presented to the world and, more importantly, to the teenaged girl currently wielding a scalpel under the watchful eye of her grandmother. Jean thought that maybe he should be scared, but while it was true that he was not looking forward to the coming pain, he found himself rather at peace the with idea of what he was about to do. After all, Edward had been coming to this place for years to have his automail maintained, and everything seemed to be working for him. Besides, Ed had been eleven when he had undergone the same thing, so while it would be bad, it couldn’t be _that_ bad.

Then the blade made its first incision and _oh_.

Jean would like to say that the pain had all blended together after a while, until it was just a constant buzzing, or that it had been so much that his body had been overwhelmed to the point of passing out, but that just wasn’t the case. Instead, the blade sliced through his nerves and sent jarring, lancing pain up to explode behind his eyelids in red fireworks. There was no escaping it, not when you were messing with something wired directly into the brain’s pain receptors. Jean realized that he was yelling and crying, but he could not even begin to search for the self-control that would be needed to contain the sounds. This was so much more than agony.

Jean lost himself in it, and for a time that could have been days or seconds, he was a being composed only of pain. When the pain finally eased, he tumbled headfirst into sleep, with no thought or transition in between.

*~*~*

When he woke up, his body felt different. There was a sharp ache in his lower back, and the rest of his body felt brittle and stretched, as if he had been taken apart, roughed up, and the shoved back together, full of new edges where there hadn’t been any before. The act of blinking took monumental effort.

“What were you thinking?” The emotionless voice came from his right, and Jean would have turned to look if his head didn’t currently weigh around a ton and a half. As it was, he didn’t actually need to look. It was Mustang.

Apparently grasping the situation, Mustang’s face soon appeared at the edge of his vision, gazing down at him in a confused respect. He had yet to realize that words were quite beyond Jean’s grasp at the moment.

“He’s a dumbass. He wasn’t thinking.” Ed was here? Sure enough, his face soon appeared opposite Mustang’s, gazing down on Jean with blatant disapproval, but he hardly noticed. Instead, the still-paralyzed man found his eyes straying to the once-automail shoulder of the young alchemist. Eleven. Ed had been eleven years old when he had gone through the pain that Jean had just endured. And that wasn’t all. He had endured the absolute agony of port installation on his shoulder and had then _done it again_ on his leg.

This was no child above him. Jean had known that in theory from the moment they had met, but this was the first time that it truly struck home. Hell, Ed was barely human. He was determination personified and contained within a flesh shell.

But all this thinking was making him tired. Without consulting him, Jean’s eyes began to droop closed, and he drifted off.

*~*~*

The next time Jean woke up, the metal frames had been attached to his legs, but the nerves had not been reattached. He knew because he could see glinting metal out of the bottom of his vision, but there was no feeling being relayed to his mind by the pressure plates.

“Oh good, you’re awake.” It was Pinako this time, the old woman whom he had met the morning of his operation. She was currently heaping pillows behind his back while Ed lifted his upper body.

To his pleasure, it seemed as though Jean’s vocal cords were willing to work today. “Where’s Winry?”

“Oh, she’s sleeping off the most recent all-nighters. She’s been working almost non-stop on this frame for you.” As she spoke, Pinako pointed toward the gauzy curtains over the window and Ed, apparently used to this sort of silent command, walked over to open them up. A wash of mid-morning sunlight flooded the room and set all the floorboards to glowing. “But it’s okay, because I have Ed to help me.” Judging by the twist in Ed’s lip, Jean could guess that ‘helping’ was not one of his favorite activities. So it looked as though there were two women living here who could order the Fullmetal Alchemist around.

“So, how are you feeling?” As she spoke, the elderly woman ran her fingers down the framework, pausing at joints and checking to make sure that everything was perfectly arranged.

Jean pondered the question. There was a ringing in his head and a buzzing in his ears that felt like a terrible hangover times a thousand. All of his muscles felt like they had the day after his one and only trip to the gym with Major Armstrong. There was a stinging pain in his lower back that would throb when he took a deep breath. All in all, he still felt like death, but at least he no longer felt like death warmed-over, so he supposed that was something.

“Not so good, but I’m definitely on the mend.” Apparently, the information Pinako was gathering from his legs matched his current assessment, because she nodded to herself and then turned her intense gaze onto Jean.

“Well that’s good. We won’t get started on rehab until we reconnect the nerves, but today we are just going to do a check of everything else, to make sure that none of your working nerves were damaged in the process. Problem Ed?” Edward had been staring at the woman in confusion while she spoke, and now he spoke up.

“Giving special treatment to non-family members?” he asked. “I never did this.” He sounded indignant, but Pinako huffed out a breath in response.

“As I recall, Edward, you were already trying to get out of the bed and walk on the unattached leg at this point. There was no need to check. Now shut up and read your damn book. I’ll tell you when I need you.” Ed just stuck his tongue out and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like _old hag_ under his breath as he grabbed a book off the side table. In moments, he was lost to the rest of the world.

Jean, on the other hand, was staring at the teen, while absently moving muscles and joints as the old woman called them out. It had always astounded Jean, the casual tone of voice that Ed would adopt when addressing his missing limb. Amputees were the sort of thing that society spoke of in hushed tones, behind raised hands, as if it were something to be brushed to the side and ignored. But Ed had always worn the automail like a badge of honor. Something that had bad memories attached, but that also showed his strength and victory over setbacks. There was always a solemnity in the Fullmetal Alchemist’s face when he revealed the atuomail.

Jean had never understood.

But now, as Ed’s hair burned in the sunlight, Jean could feel himself learning more about the old man in a child’s body. This was a boy who had felt worse than he was currently feeling, yet had already been up and around, trying to walk. Jean could hardly shift his weight, but this boy had not been able to accept a setback. He had gone through three years of rehabilitation in one year, because there were places to be and things to discover and a body to get back.

Jean laid in his bed and Ed read his book. And Jean realized that they were lucky Ed had been on their side.


End file.
